Want to Start Sending Campaigns to Your Customers? Re-Opt In Your List First

By: Dominique Blanc
Submitted: 2007-04-27 15:14:48
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If you owe an online business, selling software products, e-books, other goods or services, you must be collecting the email addresses of your customers. Over the years your database has grown to thousands of addresses. At some time you think on starting sending email newsletters to your purchasers but you are hesitating how to start. Should you send a letter with the opt-in link inviting people to subscribe to your newsletter? Or should you send a reminder that they purchased a product from you and from this time they will receive your newsletters unless they unsubscribe? Or should you just email the first issue of your newsletter? Whoa! Don't rush into an email campaign right away. You'll want to think about the following factors: 

- Not all your customers would be interested in receiving the newsletters from you. They didn't give you the explicit permission to email them. The fact that they bought from you some goods or services doesn't give you the right to broadcast the emails to them. 

- Your database is practically full of dead email addresses. The lifetime of an email address is one year in average. So, the email addresses of the customers who made a purchase several years ago may bounce because they most probably went bad. Emailing to bad addresses may result in tagging you as spammer and your emails to valid addresses being blocked.  

-  Certain recipients probably forgot about their commercial relationships with you and they may click on the "Report Spam" button because they don't know why you are emailing them.

All is not too bad though. You can still get some use of your list of you approach your email campaign wisely. Email an opt-in letter as the outset and delete those addresses that either bounce or don't respond in a set period of time. Consider including the following elements into your introductory message: 

1. Newsletter benefits. Start your message with the following statement (or something similar) "Thank you for being with us all these years. We've launched our email newsletter and hope you would like to opt-in in order you could receive valuable coupons and exclusive offers".

2. Opt-in link or link to your sign-in page. 

3. Discount coupon or exclusive offer in return for the subscription. Explain also what your readers can expect receiving from you. 

4. Privacy statement like "We will keep your personal information private and secure. We will not share your email address with any third party" and a link to a complete Privacy Policy page at your web site. 

If you start with a preface letter containing the elements above, your active email list will be absolutely smaller that the one you have now. But this list will be permission-based, valid and consequently will deliver higher response rates in the future.

I've just scratched the surface in the article presented. You can learn a lot more here HTML Email Guide.

Article source: Expert Articles

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